The Absurd Condition of Human Existence
According to Albert Camus, the French author who popularized the philosophy of absurdity, the fundamental question in life is whether man should commit suicide or not.
In his famous essay, The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus describes absurdism as the contradiction and disharmony between man’s constant search for meaning and universal order and the inability for our chaotic, uncaring universe to provide that meaning. Therefore, Camus asks, is killing yourself the answer to ending this contradiction?
Pretty much every human has at one time felt a deep sense of the absurdity of life. What’s the point of it all? Why are we here? Why do I and my loved ones have to die? Personally, such thoughts often hit me like a train out of nowhere.
According to Camus, suicide is not optimal because the absurdity should be lived through. Do the things you enjoy in full knowledge that none of it really has any ultimate meaning and nor will you ever find one. Revolt against this contradiction.
Camus describes the adoption of religious or spiritual beliefs as a form of philosophical suicide. To him, people who recognize the inherent lack of meaning in the world and who choose to believe in religious ideas of meaning anyway are intellectually lazy, unable to accept the truth, or both.
The Philosophy of Alan Watts
It is only in light of reading Camus’ work on life’s absurdity that the ideas of the British philosopher Alan Watts have taken on more poignancy for me. I believe Watts was trying all along to help us all make sense of chaos and close the separation we feel between ourselves and a seemingly cold, uncaring universe.
One of Watts’ most quoted metaphors is the comparison between apple trees and the universe. Just as an apple tree produces apples, the universe produces people.
Is this then another possible answer to the problem of absurdity? It seems to me as if Watts is saying that the absurdist’s starting position is all wrong—the conflict between our desire for unity and ultimate meaning and a seemingly uncaring universe that can’t provide any meaning only exists because we feel separate from the universe we inhabit.
Wouldn’t absurdism dissolve as a dilemma if the starting position we took as humans was that we are a process of the universe itself? Watts seems to suggest that we are the meaning we are looking for from the world.
Alan Watts once said that “The meaning of life is just to be alive.” I think this perfectly encapsulates his philosophy.
The problem is that man doesn’t feel himself to be an intrinsic part of the universe. Our default condition appears to be a constant sense of separation from the world around us.
We look up at the night sky and are awed by the infinite space we see, the vastness of things that aren’t us, and we feel smaller and more isolated. We can’t even relate to other humans as we log into social media and feel alienated from rather than connected to people.
Alan Watts was most concerned with how we can feel ourselves as united with the universe rather than how to intellectually understand that unity. Through fusing his Western background with a passion for Eastern spirituality, Watts brought a different way of thinking to the West that influenced the hippy subculture of the 1960s.
He was fascinated with Buddhism, Taoism, and Hinduism. After religiously studying Eastern concepts, ideas, and philosophies, Watts came to the conclusion that the West needed to hear about these ideas to perhaps stimulate us into looking at life differently.
The Way of Zen, The Wisdom of Insecurity, and The Joyous Cosmology are three important books Watts wrote that try to get across this idea of life as a flowing process that started with the big bang and that we, as humans living in the universe, are playing a fundamental part in.
“There was a big bang at the beginning of things and it spread. And you and I, sitting here in this room, as complicated human beings, are way, way out on the fringe of that bang. If you think that you are only inside your skin, you define yourself as one very complicated little being, way out on the edge of that explosion.
And then we cut ourselves off, and don’t feel that we’re still the big bang. But you are. If there was a big bang in the beginning–you’re not something that’s a result of the big bang. You’re not something that is a sort of puppet on the end of the process. You are still the process. You are the big bang, the original force of the universe, coming on as whoever you are.”
These are profound words, and they cut to the heart of absurdism by seemingly overcoming the notion that we humans are helpless creatures cut off from a cold, infinite universe that provides no answers as to why we are here.
If we feel that our lives are a continuation of a universal process, questions about where we came from and why we are here both become much less important.
Camus might argue that feeling unity with the universe still doesn’t ultimately answer why the big bang happened in the first place and thus doesn’t satisfy the desire for ultimate meaning and truth. But I’m just playing with ideas here.
Alan Watts makes us rethink our relationship with life and with the universe. But is it ever possible to feel that unified relationship he alludes to with every fabric of our being and thus cease to see ourselves as existing in a purposeless chaotic universe that spans infinite space?
Psychedelic Experiences
The psychedelic experience seems to provide a possible solution. Common among experiences on LSD, ayahuasca, and psilocybin are feelings of cosmic consciousness. Such experiences have been written and spoken about with profound lucidity and clarity by Watts himself and by people like Aldous Huxley, Terence Mckenna, and Albert Hoffman.
A brief visit to internet forums like Reddit and Erowid presents you with vast swathes of psychedelic trip reports, and common among them are similar feelings of unity with the universe as were described by the aforementioned authors and thinkers.
It’s worth also noting that studies recently conducted at Johns Hopkins research centre have noted a profound impact of the psychedelic experience on terminal cancer patients who are approaching death. The reduction in death anxiety was staggering—people became much more comfortable with their own mortality.
Ego Death
It appears Watts may have been on to something. The existential angst that encompasses the human experience seems to dissipate somewhat when our brain chemistry and consciousness is temporarily altered.
Psychedelics reduce activity in a part of the brain known as the default mode network. As Michael Pollan wrote in his excellent book, How to Change Your Mind, if there was a specific brain location for the ego, the default mode network is its home.
Reduced activity in the default mode network is likely responsible for the famous ego death so common to intense psychedelic experience. If our consciousness is capable of such a drastic alteration so as to reshape our relationship with the universe, one might wonder why that is not our default mode of consciousness.
My own guess is that it wouldn’t have been very conducive to evolutionary progress if humans spent all day in awe of our own existence and unity with everything around us. It is perhaps a cruel product of evolution that we are destined to feel separation, isolation, and conflict with the world.
Shamanic rituals involving various plants have likely been performed for thousands of years. There’s a good chance they led to the development of many religious ideas that we are familiar with. Besides the cosmic consciousness, ingesting these substances often comes with dazzling hallucinogenic states.
But do we all need to eat a mega-dose of magic mushrooms to feel one with the world? Not everyone can handle something like that without proper therapeutic guidance (or for some individuals, even with such guidance).
Meditation offers another path. Many experienced meditators report a feeling of dissolution of the self and oneness with the world when they go sufficiently deep with the practice. Zen Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta are spiritual practices that also describe the experience of ego death, and meditation plays a prominent part in both.
Dissolving Absurdity
Tying this back to Camus’ absurdism, if we find out that there is no I that needs to seek meaning from the world, then doesn’t the problem of absurdity cease to be? After all, Camus said that absurdity needs both the human search for meaning and a cold, uncaring meaningless universe that can’t provide an answer.
If people realize their true nature as one with the universe, as the universe in flux, then we don’t need meaning outside of our own existence. By living this life, we are the meaning we seek.
I don’t know if the realization of the true self as a universal process is the answer to the absurd condition, but it is certainly worth pondering. And I hope you got something from this post; because I certainly got something from people like Camus and Watts who eloquently described and tried to offer solutions for the absurd human condition.
Check out my recommended reading material for much more on these intriguing topics.